Hi, I'm Zibby Owens. Welcome to Totally Booked, where I get to talk to my favorite authors and hopefully make them yours as well. Today, I am so excited to have Kelly Corrigan back on my show this time to talk about Marianne The Maker written by Kelly and her daughter, Claire Corrigan Liktie.

Just so exciting.

And here's a little bit about Kelly.

Kelly Corrigan has been called the voice of her generation by O, the Oprah magazine,

and the poet laureate of the ordinary by The Huffington Post.

She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Tell Me More, The Middle Place, Lift, and Glittering Glue.

Between Books, she hosts a podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders, featuring intimate conversations with high IQ-E-Q types about well-being, purpose, and impact.

Marianne The Maker, a collaboration with Kelly's daughter, Claire.

It's her second book for children. Kelly managed to write Hello World all by herself.

Welcome, Kelly. Thank you. So great to be here.

Oops. Okay. Marianne the Maker. Tell everyone all about it.

So Claire and I had this burgeoning conviction that there is a great need to return to creative work in a more regular way, in a real low-stakes way, and that we have

over-scheduled both our children and ourselves at great peril. And so while it is like a really

fun kids book about this girl who is sick of being sent to soccer practice, a sport her dad loved,

and really just wants to stay home and work on her invention, which is this flying machine that she calls a moodle boot,

with her dog, whose name is Patrick Swayze, because she's a kid who loved the 80s, inexplicably.

What's underneath it for us is this belief that we have abandoned this part of our

nature and that it's causing problems. So I sort of think of making and creativity as one solution to two

huge problems. One is mental health plummeting and two is the lack of societal progress. And I think that

that maker mindset is the answer is an answer to both problems. So if you look at the research and the

data, which I bet you didn't think we were going to talk about today. Let's go there. But if you

look at it in a book like your brain on art, have you read that? No. Okay, so it's two women who wrote it, Susan Maximum, who's a neuroscientist at Hopkins, Ivy Ross, who runs a design group of Google. And the two of them got together and they pooled together all the research about neuroaesthetics, about what happens to us when we are creating or making.

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